Pitchfork, I respectfully disagree.

RYAN DOMBOL, from Pitchfork, on Minty Fresh's JAYDIOHEAD mashup project, combining Jay-Z's vocal tracks with Radiohead's instrumentals for ten songs:

"Who has patience for this type of thing in 2009? Even Girl Talk faltered when he put Jay's "Roc Boys" over "Paranoid Android" on Feed the Animals-- and that was just 30 seconds of Jaydio-ness. This is 38.1 mintues worth! The best thing to come out of the project are the titles, which often cross over into so-bad-they're-amazing territory."

If Pitchfork Media were thought of as the blog, the bloated opinion site (which is totally cool) fronting as a news & review e-zine, rather than the wunderkind heir to Rolling Stone, I think people would feel a lot less threatened by the site. I love what Pitchfork does. I think more writers need to be dicks, and very blunt about it, because otherwise--who gives a fuck?? We're just reading other people's opinions. Sure, there are standards and there is something that is definatively good, and something that is definatively bad, but it's all sorta relative. We like what we're going to like, and if everyone were more adventurous as a culture, we wouldn't need people to write about their opinions. My point in all of this hazy, 2am rambling is that everybody freaks the fuck out whenever Pitchfork shits on something their favorite band, or does something cunty like reviewing the really fucking fun but kinda irrelevant debut album from The Black Kids with a lolcat, people would click through on their daily journeys through DIGG, and have a fleeting giggle at their cleverness, maybe leave a comment that says something like "hey, the black kids a'ight. I like sum of their songs," and move on with your life. But unlike my earlier blog about AICN, I am not saying the world would be a better place without Pitchfork. Pitchfork is one of the only interesting music sites around these cluttered modern landscapes, and this blog is to respect disagree with one of their few completely goddamn retarded points.

There is a dipstick novelty element to I'd say to 53% of all the mashups out there. Most come from hazy 2AM laptop jam sessions where someone says "Wouldn't be fucking cool if Goddamn Lil Wayne recorded the Carter III with Meat Loaf" and someone else who could probably drive to Taco Bell right now if you really needed him to, made the thing happen (they would call it WEEZY IN HELL, and Pitchfork would praise the inventive artwork which portrayed a cartoon Lil Wayne on a DIVINE COMEDY-esque journey through hell, but hate the album). It means about as much as "White and Nerdy," and will be forgotten just as fast (unless their lucky enough to fall into an equally meaningless but more-fun-I-imagine cult status, which is the only thing to explain Weird Al's continued musical existence).

But there is an art to mashups... there are those that simply aim to make an interesting dancy version of some other song... a glorified remix. And there is the thing GIRL TALK is doing, where he uses snippits of other songs as colors in a painting, and the end result has a "message" like any other respected artist releasing an album. The art is infrequent, and yes, JAYDIOHEAD probably sucks (I'm downloading it now, I'll report back later; if I never bring it up again, assume ambivalence), but you're an influential beast Pitchfork, and I'd hate to see you shit on the entirity of a genre of music because of a few morons who think being clever is the only real thing needed to be totally awesome.